Screenshot of the Month January 2010 [Winner announced!]

[Ravi08]

Nice one Mel, wen i first looked at that image my first reaction was f**k that looks gd

[randomMesh]

John Conway's Game of Life. In 3D!
This is a grid of 20*20*20 cells. No logic so far, just figuring out how to render so much cubes efficiently.

[Mel]

That game of life is great the only thing i see is that it is really complex to see what happens inside the cube!

And to think that game can be extended to 4 or 5 dimensions... How could those be represented?

[r2d2]

if you want a 4 dim representation you could take several such 3d blocks and put them next to each other, that shouldn't be much of a problem

[lpersona]

Mel's pic clearly stands out for me

[hybrid]

Ok, winner announced, Mel made it with a pretty outstanding way ahead. Congratulations!

[Asimov]

Hi Mel,

That is a brillient scene in irrlicht. Didn't think it could handle something that size.
My only small critique is this. You have very bright sun light, which usually results in harsh shadows, other than that perfect.

[The_Glitch]

You would be surprised what you can do with Irrlicht. Only problem I find is when you run into a problem sometimes it's hard to tell If you made a mistake or if it's a bug within Irrlicht.

[Mel]

Hi Mel,

That is a brillient scene in irrlicht. Didn't think it could handle something that size.
My only small critique is this. You have very bright sun light, which usually results in harsh shadows, other than that perfect.

In fact Irrlicht handles what your video card is able to handle on its own

You'd be amazed of what irrlicht is really capable of, if well cared. In fact, the largest advantage of Irrlicht is this: It just abstracts the underlying API while it allows you to program just all what you think of on top of it. In general terms, it provides the imprescindible constructs for it to be much more a simplified video driver than an engine on its own. But it also adds aditional systems so Irrlicht can work like a basic engine while you polish your own code.

And don't be fooled, even if this could mean that programming directly GL/ES or DirectX is better, actually what most applications do is precisely to build a small set of tools to help them automate some tasks for the larger engine behind it, and that is what Irrlicht is. It is an API for the basic stuff and an engine for more advanced things which almost never restricts you to do something. There are missing features, indeed (cubemaps, texture arrays...) but even so can be built using basic functionalities of the engine. (texture atlases)

The limit is your video card, and your imagination, as they say.